Wine, motorcycles, rugby, painting, literature and other things that make life so much worth living

28 Nov 2011

More postcards from Beirut

And this crazy city, with its often useless opulence that lies side by side with squalor, and some oases of beauty like this top level of the hotel Le Gray where my colleagues and I have spent three days tasting virtually all the wines of Lebanon, and the people whose enthusiasm and resilience is just amazing (and quite contagious). You walk down the street and see Lamborghinis and Ferraris and there are no roads where you can drive without meeting a pothole or a radical change of surface and level every 100 meters. And all kinds of crazy stuff like that: bling-bling and Flash Harrys meet and surf along the waves of violent and archaic divisions of the region, its past and its present colliding permanently.